Two studies push back on recent analyses that claim to demonstrate empirical links between food aid and conflict and climate change and conflict.

To stop and perhaps one day reverse climate change requires changes big and small. Despite the thousands of power plants burning coal and other fossil fuels today, nearly 3 billion people still depend on solid fuels, such as wood, dung, and crop residues, for their daily energy needs.

Despite some critics, the recent U.S.-China agreement over carbon emissions has sparked remarkable optimism in global climate negotiations. It’s also opened the door to new bilateral engagement between the U.S. and Chinese environmental communities on other issues, including China’s massive air pollution problems (16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in China).

Climate change and conflict – what’s the relationship? In a recently completed set of field-based studies for USAID, the Foundation for Environmental Security and Sustainability set aside “yes-or-no” questions about whether climate change causes conflict and replaced them with pragmatic and politically informed questions about how climate change is consequential for conflict in specific fragile states.

Until two years ago, when the National Wildlife Federation pointed out their presence, the 61-year-old steel oil pipelines running beneath the fast-flowing Mackinac Straits between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron were like nearly every other piece of North America’s energy transport network: out of sight and out of mind.

“We cannot ignore the new reality that climate change has become a major foreign policy issue in the 21^st century,” a new film by Hal and Marilyn Weiner concludes.

Water is a key ingredient for peace, especially in the Middle East. The Jordan River, which forms the border between Israel, the Palestinian West Bank, and Jordan, is central to the interrelated political and environmental challenges facing the region. Addressing these challenges requires not only high-level diplomacy but also direct, people-to-people engagement, which can form lasting relationships that go beyond water, said experts at the Wilson Center on October 17. [Video Below]